The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories eBook

There is a plenty of other testimonies in the magazine,
but these quoted samples will answer. They show
the kind of trade the Science is driving. Now
we come back to the question; Does it kill a patient
here and there and now and then? We must concede
it. Does it compensate for this? I am
persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that
direction. For instance: when it lays its
hands upon a soldier who has suffered thirty years
of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and
mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement?
This, I think: that it has restored to life
a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year
for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful
one. But for its interference that man would
have essentially died thirty times more, in the three
years which have since elapsed. There are thousand
of young people in the land who are now ready to enter
upon a life-long death similar to that man’s.
Every time the Science captures one of these and secures
to him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured
disease, it may plausibly claim that in his person
it has saved 300 lives. Meantime it will kill
a man every now and then; but no matter, it will still
be ahead on the credit side.

VIII

’We consciously declare that
“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,”
was foretold as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy,
in Revelation x. She is the “mighty
angel,” or God’s highest thought to
this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation
of the Bible in the “little book open”
(verse 2). Thus we prove that Christian
Science is the second coming of Christ—­Truth—­Spirit.’
—­Lecture by Dr. George Tomkins, D.D.,
C.S.

There you have it in plain speech. She is the
mighty angel; she is the divinely and officially sent
bearer of God’s highest thought. For the
present, she brings the Second Advent. We must
expect that before she has been in her grave fifty
years she will be regarded by her following as having
been herself the Second Advent. She is already
worshipped, and we must expect this feeling to spread
territorially, and also to deepen in intensity [1].

Particularly after her death; for then, as anyone
can foresee, Eddy-worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools
and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she
puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial
spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and
gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish
in his house. I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science
Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale.
And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash
in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then
the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real
one. From end to end of the Christian-Science
literature not a single (material) thing in the world
is conceded to be real, except the Dollar. But